John Cleese and his wife Alyce Faye

JOHN CLEESE insisted yesterday that he was only joking when he suggested that he was emigrating to California because he was tired of English weather and being portrayed as a sad clown.

The comedian, best known in Britain as the inept hotelier from Fawlty Towers and the silly walker and purchaser of dead parrots from Monty Python, said: "I haven't the slightest intention of quitting England."

But following retorts of "good riddance", Cleese has blamed the row on a misunderstanding in a Hollywood interview to promote his latest American film, The Rat Race - the third highest-grossing film in the United States last week, with box office receipts of £7.8 million.

He told the interviewer that the movie was a slapstick comedy that could not be made in England, let alone appreciated here. "England is less tolerant of silliness than it used to be. It takes a lot of nerve on the part of writers, directors and actors to shoot scenes of people hanging from a plane smashing into cows."

Cleese, 61, who is now installed in California with his third wife, the Oklahoma-born psychoanalyst Alyce Faye Eichelberger, was also reported as saying: "At my age I want to wake up and see sunshine pouring in the windows every day. That certainly precludes living in England any more."

He added: "I'm tall, I write satire and I've been well-known in England for 26 years. Put those things together with an overactive, unimaginative press and I couldn't do anything over there."

Cleese came under immediate fire for joining Tracey Ullman, Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis in abandoning his homeland with a self-righteous whine.

However, he told the BBC Today show that "in fact" he intended to split his time between Britain and the United States.

He has just sold his London home in Holland Park for £5 million, 24 years after buying it from the singer Bryan Ferry for £80,000, and is acquiring a £2 million mews home around the corner, to add to his apartment in Manhattan and three-bedroomed beach house at Montecito, near Santa Barbara, California.

"I think what I may have said is that I didn't think the comedy on English television was of the high quality that it has been until rather recently. And I think, oddly enough, for the first time in a long time the comedy on American television is rather better than we are producing."

He added: "I don't think the theatre scene is quite as good as it was in the 1960s and 1970s. But then I'm such an old twit that I can remember going to the National and seeing Olivier, Richardson and Gielgud.

"But I think the arts scene is better than it has ever been. The architecture is better. I think the music is arguably better."

He added: "I do notice that the traffic gets worse every year. What I find a bit depressing, because one does have this sense of family about England, is that the services, the education, the transport, aren't very good.

"Yet when I talk to people, they don't have much of a sense of optimism that anyone is going to make things much better, and that bothers me. I think what's happening is that power in England is much too centralised, compared with, say, 100 years ago. I think Mrs Thatcher has to carry the can for starting this. And I think we've got to hand power right back to local government and get away from this basic control freakery."

Cleese, who appears in the forthcoming Harry Potter and The Philosopher's Stone, is waiting to hear when shooting starts on the new James Bond film in which he plays the gadget expert "R", taking over from the late Desmond Llewelyn, who played "Q".

Asked about criticism that he was basically a one-joke comedian he replied, with some sarcasm: "Oooh, that's spot-on, absolutely. I think almost everything I have done since I was about 35 has been a disaster, hasn't it?"